


Blood Orange

by allsorrowsborne



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Addiction, Alternative Universe - Hannibal (TV), Blood Kink, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Drowning, Drug Use, Eve backstory, Eve had sex with other women, Eve is a mess, F/F, Grief, Hannibal finale, Loss, Mildly Dubious Consent, Murder Kink, Murder Wives, POV Eve Polastri, POV Second Person, Poetic, Self-Harm, Severed Finger, Sex, dark!eve, dark!villanelle, happy ending??, it's grim for a while but hang in there, orgasm denial (mentioned), possible major character death, strap sucking (mentioned)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:15:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26839558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allsorrowsborne/pseuds/allsorrowsborne
Summary: Many months post-bridge scene, Villanelle is in prison after Eve has betrayed her. They reunite for an ill-fated mission that leads them to the edge of a cliff.Violence, romance, tension, bloodshed. Memories of sex and death and betrayal. Heavy Hannibal vibes. Canon-compliant. Sometime after season 3. Pay attention to the tags!
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 81
Kudos: 111





	1. The Bluff is Eroding

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nextgreatadventure](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nextgreatadventure/gifts).



> I didn’t know whether to tag this “major character death” or not. It’s complicated! See the notes at the end of chapter one if you want to know more before you read. 
> 
> This began as a riff on the Hannibal finale, but it quickly became something else. It still has strong Hannibal vibes but it won’t matter if you haven’t watched that show.

The juice from the orange is dripping down your chin. You should have grabbed a napkin from the cafeteria. You should have done a lot of things that you didn’t do. You should have said no to this plan, for example. It’s stupid, of course. That’s no surprise. It’s as bad as when you hired Villanelle to kill you. It’s worse than when you traveled to Rome. Carolyn is still playing puppeteer, pulling the strings and watching you dance. You hate dancing. Except that time you danced with Villanelle. Back when you thought that you might like to comfort her, might enjoy trying to make her smile. It seems like a lifetime ago. Maybe it is. Lives have been lost since then, after all. Not yours though. Not hers. You could take some credit for that if you wanted. If you had any interest in taking what you want.

Villanelle is your prisoner now. Her Majesty’s prisoner to be more precise. Or nobody’s prisoner. Except her own. She demanded your presence from her cell, her one condition for joining this farce of fake escapes and traps and captures. She would be bait, if you would be fisherman. Together, you would reel in Hélène. After all that has happened, Hélène would not be able to resist. What about you? Would you?

The orange doesn’t look normal. It doesn’t taste right either. Blood orange maybe? You thought it would be sweeter, like a satsuma. It definitely doesn’t look like blood. You wipe your face with your sleeve and toss it into the bin as you leave the cafeteria, heading for the van outside. You weren’t even hungry. It was just a way to pass the time. 

\---

Villanelle had let herself get caught, of course. She had walked right up to you at the end, fallen to her knees in the early morning snow and it wasn’t exactly the scene you had imagined, as she placed her hands behind her back, waiting for the cuffs to come. She had leaned forward, forehead pressing into your stomach, so close to where she had been hours before, and she breathed you in, smells to remember for the duration. There was blood, of course, on the snow, between your legs, soaking wadded white cotton red. Traces on her fingers too, so soon after she had left your body. You had betrayed her, maybe. Sometimes it was hard to tell. She hadn’t seemed to mind either way. She would walk into any trap one thousand times if it would tap into time with you.

“I can smell you,” she had said as her last words of freedom and it wasn’t just the smell of your laundry detergent or your Evian skin cream or the perfume that she had given you that sometimes you wore but not on that day. She didn’t need to say it – _cunt_ – or inhale with open mouth so smells would settle on her tongue. You knew it then. You knew it after. The scent on your fingers, early morning, damp in your underwear, late at night. You. Her. Always her. Psychopathy doesn’t have its own smell. But if it did? 

\---

She looks beautiful today, eight months later, all shackles and fake submission, as the late afternoon sun shines through the police van window, striping shadows onto her skin through the bars of a cage. And you remember. She is tiger, always circling, even when she is on her back, even when she is in a cell, bolted to the floor of a vehicle, making its way down a country road. Especially then, perhaps. 

The road is bumpy with potholes, created by ice and sustained by austerity. The backs of your thighs thud up and down on the wooden bench lining the side of the van. There’s an armed guard next to you, shotgun at the ready, strapped on phallics that cannot compete. Not with her. You stare at her warily, taking in the scene of confinement, the body restraints that stop her escaping, the mouth guard that stops her from ripping out throats. Somehow she wears it like seduction. You want to reach in and take take take whatever you want, whatever that is. You want to pretend she will never break free, never break you, whatever that means. She greets your stare – meets and murders – as if she is already boiling the water, tasting the marinade, testing the tenderness, bringing out flavors, savoring the salt of your skin.

You let her eat you once. Somehow you made it out alive. Taste acquired and let go.

When the van bumps again, harder this time, it shocks your cunt, jolting the tampon you put in this morning. Somehow you’re always bleeding around her. The head restraints hide her mouth, but you know that she chews her lip. The van engine masks her sounds, but you know that she swallows hard. Her dick isn’t anywhere close, but you know that she ghost-rides memories of how you gagged and exhaled and opened when she claimed your throat as her own. You squeeze your thighs. Avert your eyes. You look towards the police car ahead of you, the other behind you, counting the convoy as a distraction. One, two. No use. Your mind, your body, are still here, in the middle, sandwiched together with her.

“Use me.” You had said it that evening. Terrified that you might say it again.

\---

A gunshot stops everything. Freeze frame. Another restarts it. The world accelerates, tilts sideways, sequence obscured. The police car in front of you flips and ignites. Another crashes. The van you ride in swerves into a ditch. And you? You slide. Down the bench, onto the floor, into the bulkhead, under the agent with the gun. Villanelle is held steady – caresses and captures – by restraints and the side of her cage. Your eyes never leave her body. Familiar feeling of vomit rising.

Three days after she had been arrested, you had stood at the entrance to an underground station, fighting back the need to throw up. You could still feel her on you, despite the showers, despite the betrayals. She was stuck in your head, lodged in your cunt, and if she were with you – what were you _thinking?_ – you would use her fingers to peel off the bruises, use her teeth to rip off the fingerprints pressed into bone. Three o’clock in the afternoon. Daydreams of being skinned alive.

You had turned her in to stop those feelings. They hadn’t stopped.

Your throat had been dry and sore and empty. A station vending machine took your money and kept your soda and incited your rage. You shook it fiercely and shouted loudly until people moved away, muttering. _Fucking psycho_. When the can fell, you opened it quickly, shocked as it spurted over your shirt. Darker and stickier than you expected.

Blood spurts over the windshield as bullets enter men’s skulls. Darker and stickier. Brains spurt over your jeans. A man you don’t recognize enters through the van’s rear doors. He takes keys from a dead guard’s belt and unlocks the cage, tossing them to Villanelle. He turns to you, as afterthought, gun raised.

“No, Arturo. That one’s mine.” 

Words of possession. Not protection. Consonants thick in her throat. Fear and lust bind together in your stomach.

Arturo shrugs lightly. He exits the van and drives away. Villanelle steps outside. Handcuffs dangle from her wrist as she squints into the dying sun. 

“Look, Eve.” She gestures to the scene before you, the dead bodies, wrecked cars. “All for me?”

You wonder who fishes now, who is bait, who is quarry. You wonder if you care. Her hands were in your underwear once, finding your wetness, summoning shame. _All for me?_

There was blood then. There is blood now, smeared across the windshield of the vehicle that pulls up beside you, Villanelle at the wheel. She leans over the seat and opens the passenger door for you, as if she is a gentleman and you are her lady. She pushes a dead cop onto the ground.

“Are you coming? We need to get there before Hélène, okay?”

“Where?”

She does not owe you any answers. She gives them regardless. “A safe house, Eve.” You have never felt less safe.

The officer at your feet is ugly – his children would be ugly too – and you reach down for the gun at his belt and claim it as your own. Villanelle watches, as you check the bullets and check off memories of weapons that have passed between you.

You should arrest her now.

“Eve?” She says your name as if she tastes it.

You should walk away and leave.

“Eve?”

Text MI6. Call this in.

“Eve!”

But she is bait and you are biting, the fishhook piercing the roof of your mouth. You feel its tug, the flood of saliva.

“I’m coming,” you say before you can stop it.

You step on the dead cop’s body, breastbone cracking, take your seat, and buckle in. You feel the crunch of rubber on bone as Villanelle backs up – “oops” – turns the wheel and enters the road.

“I am glad we get to do this, Eve.”

She steers the car up a mountain road.

\---

You don’t know why you are surprised that she can drive. You should be used to it by now, all the ways that she is unexpected. She has shown them to you often enough. When she let you go on the bridge. When she walked away from the Twelve. When she relented and went back to them, turned on Hélène in a failed bloody coup that killed Hélène’s family, left her murderous, led Villanelle – distraught – to your door.

“I fucked up, Eve.” Blood had dripped from a cut by her eye, a gash in her leg, leaving trails down the garden path. The smell of paraffin on her clothes. “It wasn’t my fault but it doesn’t matter. Hélène wants me dead. She gets what she wants.”

You had let her in. She had taken off her jacket and thrown it carelessly over the bannisters, pacing up and down. You had noticed the duffel bag at her feet.

“I’m leaving, okay? It’s over. I’m dead.” 

And then she had turned on you quickly. You hadn’t retreated. You had let her crowd you against the wall. She had looked scared for a moment, but fear could be slippery, morph into violence. Your fear too, it could morph into sex. Her hands were on you before you could ask her. “Let me,” she said. And you did. 

The sex had been desperate. Overdetermined. She had fucked you as if she thought she were killing you. You had come as if you thought that she had. Unrelenting. Fucking deranged. And then you knew that you would never be satisfied, never stop wanting it, never stop chasing her, never stop wondering if she were dead. Obsession intensified with every orgasm. She had gripped your cunt like you were property. Gripped your jaw to make sure you watched. You had wanted it more that you could admit. You had needed to steal yourself back.

You couldn’t have her. You couldn’t lose her. You turned her in instead. ~~~~

At least you always knew where to find her.

And here she is, by your side, driving your traitorous ass to their safe house. Her hands haven’t left the wheel. You wonder if she plans revenge. You wonder again if you care. She pulls into a gravel driveway. You get out of the car first.

\---

The house is perched at the edge of a cliff.

Villanelle walks up behind you, hand on your shoulder. In some other life, you might have been girlfriends, wives even, taking your honeymoon at this house, remote, together, in awe of the view. But her fingers brush where the bullet entered and mark the edge of the realm of forgiveness. The place from which there’s no return. _Sorry baby_ doesn’t cut it. You know that you cut her first. Her fingers guide you towards the edge, or maybe that’s your imagination.

“It’s leaving us, Eve.” She gestures to the drop before you. “The bluff is eroding. There was much more land when I came here with Dasha and she tried to kill me. Less land when I returned with Hélène and she threatened to kill you.”

You stopped caring long ago. About the Twelve. About your value. Did you ever stop caring for her? Her actions in defense of you?

“You thought I went back to them because I was bored?” Her fingers tighten on your shoulder.

You thought she went back because she’s a psychopath. You don’t say it. What’s the point?

This is dangerous ground, you know. On the edge. You kick the gravel and watch it fall. Waves below beat at rock, eat up land, swallow whole. Newlyweds kiss elsewhere.

“Are you going to kill me?”

She ignores it.

“The bluff is still eroding, Eve. Look at us! Suspended over the roiling ocean. Dangerous, hmm? Exciting too.”

She shoves you lightly. Pulls you back. Consummate dickhead. “Don’t worry, baby.” You hate it when she calls you baby. You hate her breath against your ear, the way heat travels from body to body. “Soon all of this – the rocks, plants, you, me – will be lost to the sea.”

Her hand leaves your shoulder. You wait for it to thud at your back and push you over. You wait for it to tug at your waistband and pull you close. You wait for death or sex or both, fantasies of two together, falling apart in a hail of bullets that will come as fast and sure as you.

Whatever happened to karaoke, reading in bed, after-work drinks with friends?

Her touch is gone. You ache at its absence. She skips over to the front door. She locates a key beneath a stone and enters the house, leaving you standing. The sunset streaks the sky orange. You stare until your vision blurs, eyes streaming. You follow her inside.

\---

“Make yourself at home, Eve. I’m going to find some different clothes.”

There are dust covers on the furniture. A pair of muddy boots by the door. Somebody’s been here. You grab a bottle from an antique wine rack and open drawers in search of a corkscrew.

You startle when Villanelle returns. She wears new clothes. Simple stuff. Top. Bottom. Light. Dark. You take in their fit, the body beneath them. The arc of a tricep. The dip of an armpit. The deepened hollow of collarbones. Months of prison deprivation.

She takes some milk out of the fridge. Sniffs it, returns it.

“Villanelle. Why are we here?”

“Their plan was shit. You know that. I’ve got something better now. Hélène says – ”

You don’t want to worry. Not for her. Not for you. Feel things around her. But you do.

“Hélène wants to kill you!”

“Old news, Eve. Besides, we are all professionals. Things move quickly. Allegiances change. But you know all about that, don’t you?”

A smoke alarm chirps in a different room. Testing the battery?

“Why am I here?”

“Excellent question. You tell me.”

You knew the answer once. You wanted purpose. You wanted excitement. You wanted to bring down the Twelve. Possibly. Maybe. Now it sounds stupid. You wanted her. Always. Only. ~~~~

“I’m still trying to figure that out.”

Villanelle smiles sadly. She looks older somehow, proud and wistful and tired. She opens a drawer and removes a corkscrew.

“Were you looking for this?”

You reach out, but she snatches it back.

“I like you Eve, but I’m not stupid. You’ll stab me while you _figure it out_.” She slips in and out of your accent. Hers for the taking. A second skin. “Maybe I should stab you first?”

“You wouldn’t.” You aim for defiance. It sounds like regret. She lets it slide.

“You’re right! I wouldn’t.” Villanelle laughs as she opens the wine. “My feelings for you are so annoying. But you?” Something hardens in her voice. “You never let your feelings get in the way.”

“Feelings? Ha! What are those?”

“Eve! You are such a bad liar. I know you, remember?”

You both remember. It hangs between you.

“What happens when you stop pretending, Eve? What does it say, that voice in your head?”

The smoke detector chirps again.

You could tell her, maybe. You could tell her about that bolted door, that locked box where you’ve always stuffed it, decades of hatred and hunger and craving. You could tell her about that place in your mind, that memory palace of unacted impulses, stillborn desires, smothered before they did any harm. You could tell her about the constant torment, how it eats you, how you long to let it unspool. Spilling out like lengths of intestines.

“Let yourself, Eve. You’ll survive it, I swear.”

Your eyes dart to the shape at the window.

“Somebody’s here.”

\---

There is time, until there isn’t. The is life, until there’s not.

You hear the gunshot. The window breaks. The wine bottle shatters. Dark red liquid stains her shirt. The shock of intrusion throws you through time. You feel your elbow slam through glass. You smash champagne bottles in her flat. You watch her blood soak through bedsheets. She hits the floor, holding her stomach. Her insides are all over your hands.

“I got you,” you say, but it’s all wrong. There’s no room for repetition or reparation. Hélène walks in through patio doors, déjà vu undone.

Villanelle groans softly, drenched in blood and new betrayal. “Don't run,” Hélène cautions, turning the gun in your direction. There’s no need. _If I killed everyone who betrayed me?_

“Hélène.” Villanelle speaks from the floor. You couldn’t run away if you tried.

“Villanelle. You are far too easy.”

Hélène keeps the gun on you, as she unpacks a tripod and camera. “Set it up, please.” You follow her orders, noting assassins and their good manners. A detail that your textbooks neglected. 

“I'm going to film your death, Villanelle. Motivation for new recruits.”

“And I am going to eat your liver.”

You have never shared a meal with her. You have never argued about what to order or grabbed the last French fry off her plate. You have never watched her talk with her mouth full or slap your hand away or asked her to wait until you finish your dinner before starting dessert. You have watched her eat lunch with a couple of others. And once you drank a cup of coffee while she sat opposite, sipping iced water through a straw. But you do not know if she closes her eyes when she swallows oysters, licks her fingers when sampling marrow, prefers ice cream in a cup or a cone. You want to get drunk with her in the afternoon and eat kebabs on the way home and fuck in an alleyway as she pulls stray meat from your lips with her teeth. You want to watch her skin a chicken, grind the meat, and fry it fast in heated oil that crackles and spits in her eye.

Hélène unpacks her weapons. You have a weapon too. But as you reach for the dead man’s gun, she has already turned, already struck. Apparently, you are too easy too.

\---

You taste it before you feel it before you realize what has happened. You think it is Hélène’s fist until the metal scrapes your teeth and you register the blade was outside and then in. Your blood is down your throat, down your chin, as Hélène drives the knife through your cheek and kicks you backwards through glass doors.

You struggle to stand, you struggle to breathe, spitting blood onto stone. You crawl and slip on hands and knees, as Hélène moves closer, a crowbar in hand. Villanelle watches – she always watches – and you shouldn’t think of other surfaces, other scrambles, other times you searched through windows for eyes that mirrored your own. 

The crowbar hits your chin. It snaps you back, your head, your senses.

“You have always been such an annoying – ”

Hélène doesn’t finish the sentence. Villanelle crashes in. You’ve seen her murderous, seen her monstrous; you’ve never seen her like this.

“She’s mine!” she screams, jumping on Hélène’s back and biting off half her ear and you wonder how you ever doubted those were words of love.

Hands that gripped your wrists one evening struggle for purchase on Hélène’s throat. Hélène throws Villanelle off easily, like she’s a child. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with.” Villanelle lands near a pile of wood, a well-used axe.

Somewhere, newlyweds build fires, toast marshmallows, have sex on the living room rug.

You’ve lost the gun. Not the girl. A knife is still lodged in your face. You pull it free and is this freedom – is this fated – as you stab Hélène in the back? You don’t care. You’ve never cared. You jerk it back. Watch. Wait.

The axe thuds halfway through Hélène’s calf. Her knees buckle and Villanelle grabs her from the ground, pulling her down onto her lap. She will break Hélène’s neck in seconds.

You get there first. On your knees between their legs, you stick the knife in Hélène’s stomach. This time, you don’t scare too easily, pull out quickly. This time, you drag the blade down and cut a woman apart.

Once there was a postcard of bodies like bacon, opened like pussy, packaged like art, where Villanelle had called you darling. A crime scene staged as an invitation, a love letter, to accept an apology you never gave. You never received it – ripped it up or slept with it beneath your pillow – but now you write her one in return, Hélène’s body as your canvas.

The knife sticks. Organs. Clothing. You grunt, you saw, lower lower. Hélène’s innards tumble out. Villanelle holds her steady – all for you – and comes undone by your hand. She leans back on bloodied stone, Hélène following, split to the sky. Villanelle says your name, over and over, voice ragged, slurred with desire. _Eve Eve cut me cut me gut me Eve_. You lean into her words, her wanting, opening wounds as a portal to closeness. You buck your hips against your hand that holds the hilt against Hélène. Again. Again. And then you let yourself go. Losing yourself. Finding yourself. Drenched in soon-to-be useless blood.

The hands in your hair tug hard. They sting your scalp. It could be Hélène fighting you, holding on to the life she’s losing. It could be Villanelle holding you, fighting for the love she’s won. You fall forward. Villanelle rises. Hélène gasps, trapped between you.

Villanelle bites out her throat.

Slick and spent, you slide sideways. Villanelle pushes Hélène aside.

An almost-corpse lies between you. You could watch blood spurt from wounds, or watch life drain from eyes, but Villanelle crawls towards you, licking lips, swallowing hard.

Your blood remains in your mouth for now; it does not stray into hers.

\---

She stands first and reaches down. Together on the edge of the cliff. You take her hand and think of other edges, other drops. _Beg,_ she had said that night, as she had taken you to the edge of orgasm, brought you back, taken you again, brought you back, teasing, taunting, until you had said the words she had wanted, until she had relented and who cared if she broke your back or broke your fall. You hadn’t expected her to whisper _baby_. You hadn’t expected her to smooth back your hair. To kiss your mouth for the first time all evening. The only time that you asked her to stop. The only time that she shook her head “no.” The only time that you shook and cried as she took you again, far too gently. Her tongue in places where nobody entered easier to process than that. Too much like innocence. Too much like losing. The tenderness that had followed her violence. Harder for you than violence itself.

_Yours._ You had said it and meant it. And fuck her if she had tucked you in and brought you a glass of water. Fuck her if she had laid beside you and wanted to stay. And fuck you if you had played with fire and wanted blisters and never bothered to learn how to heal.

You look at the carnage around you now.

“It really does look black in the moonlight.”

She had told you this months ago, when she deigned to answer one of your questions, speaking through a handheld receiver, behind reinforced bullet-proof plastic, when she wanted to reach you in a way that you would recognize as love. You had hated her then for loving you still in the wake of betrayal. You do not hate her now.

Now you say it back to her, the same words and same intention. The blood on the ground, black in the moonlight, the blood in your mouth, thick on your tongue, coating teeth. You think of how she will moan when she tastes it.

How to live with her? How to live without her? Wrong questions all along. How are you going to live with yourself?

You take in the bloodshed. You take in the violence. _Yours._

“This is what I wanted – ” she begins.

“No, this is what I wanted.”

“ – for you, Eve. For both of us.”

“It's beautiful.”

You are on your feet but you stumble a little from your injuries. She catches you and you fall against her shoulder and her arms tighten around your back. She radiates heat and you thought it would end you, dissolve you like sugar in rolling water. But you swell to meet her, exceed her. You kiss and blood slides.

There are sirens in the distance and you jump back from her tongue and her hunger as you remember that this is how it ends. Hélène is dead. You are not. A job well done.

A new van will be here soon, new guards, new cage. Villanelle will return to her cell, stripped and stuffed into institutional overalls. She will receive inmate privileges for her assistance. She will ask for moisturizer. She will get a stack of magazines. You will visit when you can. Your cuts will heal and scar and fade. The waves that roar beneath the cliff, inside your skull, between your legs, will crest and break and leave. Eroded rock and puckered skin. All that will remain.

You sway in her arms and maybe you’re dizzy or maybe you’re dancing, on the brink of impossible futures. You take a step towards the edge. She does the same. Remote, together, in awe of the view. Mind reading. Double daring.

No way down this mountain road.

Car doors slam. Boots approach. “Eve?” They cannot see you here, not with her, not yet.

Soon.

\---

It will end. One way or another. Bullets or chokeholds or boredom or axes. Fires raging and chasing you here, to the edge of encroaching oceans, where lovers leap and lands end.

There are worse ways to go, you imagine. There are worse ways to survive, you know.

To stand at the edge of the world with your woman.

If you lead, she know she will follow. If you lean, new space will emerge. Beneath you, around you, within you, with her. Slick warm blood is streaming between you. Between you all that matters now.

Suspension bridges over rivers. Suspended lovers over oceans. In-between spaces. Uncertain landings. Falling – lovelike – into the sea.

Should you die, it will be together. Should you survive, it will be in her arms.

“Eve, you’re being so dramatic.”

“You want me to stop?”

Her answer is packaged in laughter, swept skyward by the wind, over the cliff, out of reach. No matter. You already know.

You lean. You fall. You hold. You hold.

You wait for waves to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter ending is purposefully ambiguous. They could both die, both survive, or have different fates. You can interpret it however you choose. 
> 
> I spent a lot of time on this one, so please let me know if you liked it and if you’d like me to make it a longer story. Thanks! And say hi on twitter @olderthaneve


	2. After the Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is what it feels like to lose her.
> 
> tw: self-harm, addiction

\---

When you lose her, you lose her to water.

\---

You thought it would be darker here. You thought it would be quieter too. But light pierces through the water, reaching the inky depths of the ocean, and skewers your vision with purples and yellows. A loud buzzing fills your ears. You screw up your eyes, but they cannot help you. Nothing can help you now. Everything hurts. There is salt in your throat and rocks at your arm and a pain that pulls you to her. She is still with you, at least. Your hand is still at the small of her back. Your fingers steeped in pools of sweat at the base of her spine, the dip that’s deeper than you expected, that swoops to meet the curve of her ass. You wonder how she sweats in water. You let it go. But not her. You hold her tight and pull her to you, pull her over, pull her under. Nobody else knows love like this. You press your head into her shoulder, angling for the twist of her fingers. She is your hook, your sink, your anchor. She holds you steady in shifting sands.

\---

One of the hospital lights is broken. It gives out a hum that is loud and grating. The fluorescent bulb flickers with no clear rhythm, an erratic pulse that has lost its way. You screw up your eyelids, but they cannot help you. Light still enters, purple and piercing, a reality that you cannot escape. Your head hurts. There are tubes down your throat and a drip in your arm and a pain that pushes you up into fantasy. Even that ends. One hand clenches a metal bedrail, cold and encasing. The other tugs at bunched up sheets.

“Good morning.”

There are footsteps in the room, a voice you have come to recognize and come to despise. Jaylene. She walks around, as she always does, busying herself with clipboards and pillows that are not quite pillows, humming and tutting. She talks to you as if you are a child. There are cartoon drawings of yellow dogs on her uniform. Fun scrubs, you think, and you want to scream and smear them with blood. Jaylene smiles at you nicely. She is good at her job. She is smart and kind. You fucking hate her. “Mrs Polastri,” she says as always. “Eve,” she retries, as she takes in your scowl. And then she moves on to talk of food and shitting and showering and bodily functions you need to regain. You don’t listen. You don’t care. Your body belongs elsewhere.

It’s better than when she talked about friends.

You drowned, they say. You died, they say. You are lucky they brought you back, they say. You know the mantra. You know it by heart.

They do not mention her. 

Villanelle is here, of course. You know that. You just haven’t seen her yet. She needed surgery and now she recovers in a different room in a different wing. They will let you visit her soon, when you are mobile, and maybe you will bring her something from the cafeteria, something instead of overcooked green beans and burnt sausage in the hollowed out compartments of institutional trays. Maybe you will bring her some chocolate. Maybe you will bring her barbecued ribs.

Your ribs are broken. Your ankle too. Two fractured bones in a foot and one in your jaw. Stitches in your mouth and skull. They shaved your head. You do not care. Falling is freedom, that’s what you thought. Recovery is slow, that’s what you know. You have been here for days now, maybe weeks. Time slips sideways in rooms without daylight, measured only by dimmer switches, the switching of shifts, a hacking cough that worsens at night. It does not belong to you, you think. The nurse who starts at 9pm doesn’t like you. It’s kind of nice. 

Villanelle didn’t need to be hospitalized. You realize that now. She is uninjured, obviously, almost invincible. You will see her again when you’re fully awake. She always visits you while you’re sleeping. You do sleep a lot. It’s probably the drugs. It’s probably the drowning. It’s probably the absence of her.

“Where is she?” You ask it once. They tip-toe around you like shit on the pavement and then leave the room, the question unanswered. You do not ask again.

They say that you will need physical therapy. They speak of goals and health and resilience and you just want her to show up with knives and cut them to pieces and eat them alive. You would laugh out loud if it wasn’t painful. At some point, they tell you to start drinking fluids. They remove the tube from your throat and the drip in your arm and the “nil by mouth” sign at the foot of your bed. Jaylene holds a straw for you. A fucking straw.

You had her in your mouth, didn’t you? You remember the taste of her, right before. You should have held her on your tongue for longer, swirled her blood around your mouth like expensive wine, savoring the oak, the smoke, the hint of berry, the not-quite-sweetness that left you wanting. You remember her scream, exhilarated, as falling forced the air from her lungs. You held her tight. You did! You did! You did not let her go.

They say they found you in different locations. They say something else but you don’t catch it, you’re carried away on a different tide. Tiredness always pulls you under and when you close your eyes you see her, skin pulled back from bones by currents. You think, perhaps, her eyes changed color. They flashed from hazel to green.

She is with you now. You are certain. She’s hiding under the bed, most likely, or maybe inside the supply cupboard, reenacting the first day you met her. You pressed your fingers into a dying woman’s neck and she was there, still in that room, bloody fingers glancing your ankle, hungry eyes upon your back. Hiding then, as she hides now, and you would have looked if wasn’t for Dom, if you weren’t tied to a hospital bed. “I’ve met her,” you said to Bill while he was living. “I’ve met her,” and you didn’t even try to stifle your smile. 

\---

By the time Carolyn visits, they’ve reduced your Oxycodone to every six hours and you hate them for it. You would sneer and yell but there are stitches in your cheek that hold your mouth together and you don’t want to rip them again. Not now. You will rip them in the future, of course, but you are going to save that for later. Save that for her.

Carolyn doesn’t waste time on niceties. She doesn’t know how. Once, you think you found it refreshing. Now you just find it fake. You don’t want to see her. You don’t want to hear her.

“Jaylene?”

You call for the nurse.

Villanelle is back in prison. That is why she hasn’t visited. She is an inmate. She is a killer. You turned her in. You forgot about that. It’s probably the drugs. Probably the drowning.

“Jaylene!”

You hit the button and holler again.

The one time you need her, Jaylene doesn’t come.

“She’s dead, Eve.”

Carolyn says it as if it is comforting. She knows that it’s not. You stare too long at the line of her mouth and watch the corners tamp down a smile. She breaks the news that she knows will break you and you won’t give her the satisfaction.

“It’s over, Eve. She’s finally gone.”

You don’t believe her. You don’t believe shit.

“I know,” you say. “I know.”

\---

They send you to a psychiatrist. He wants to know your side of the story. You embrace an author’s freedom, wrapping yourself in the silver lining of everyone else in the tale being dead. Allegedly. Maybe. Supposedly. No.

You tell him the story of Villanelle the monster who kidnapped you while you were on a mission. You hid at the house while she fought Hélène. You shook in terror behind the woodpile. She turned it into a twisted version of hide and seek, playing games in the dark of the moon: “I’m going to find you and then I’m going to eat you.” She found you and maybe she would have consumed you but you fought back, valiant hero. She grabbed an ice pick, flipped it over, and slammed it through the side of your face. Blood in your mouth. Blood in the moonlight. You fought as she muscled you over the cliff. You had never felt so frightened.

You get lost in the memory (although it’s a fake one). You embellish the details (although they are lies). You linger over the mess of Hélène’s body, of watching a madwoman tear her apart. By the time you are done, you are shaking and crying, damp with something you will call sweat.

It’s a good story. You get the pills. You get your job back. You get to lie. You like the feeling. You like the fable. Villanelle the terrible. You think that she would like it too. You don’t count it as betrayal. She is dead. You are not. Isn’t that the story you’re telling? Besides, you have betrayed her before. Before the drugs. Before the drowning. She didn’t mind. You think she admired it. You want her to admire it now.

\---

You go back home to the house where she fucked you. You wash down pills with mouthfuls of alcohol, daydream of the time she fake-poisoned you, and wait for her return. You bolt the doors so she can break them. You lock the windows so she can smash them. You start to sleep on the floor of the hallway, sitting upright, back to the wall. You mix up memories to make them more potent. She pinned you here and took your throat and sliced you open with an ice-pick. You opened your mouth to let her in and felt the stretch and pain of a wound. She left you scars but she didn’t leave you. She just drowned. No. That was you. She just teases, little dickhead. Makes you wait and bides her time. You push the loss aside like annoyance and drag your tongue over stitches. You take another pill for sleeping. Two too many and there you go.

Yours is a body you’re happy to lose.

\---

When you dream, you dream of terror, your body on a beach in winter, naked, shivering, low-tide. You wait for waves. They never muster. You wait for her. She never comes. Regret laps at this shore relentless. Somewhere, elsewhere, thunderstorms gather, but those skies are not for you. 

\---

This is what it feels like to lose her. It feels like nothing. You wait for screaming. It is quiet. You wait for furniture to fly. It is still. You wait for hands to pull out your hair and dig out your eyes and sweep through space with drama and purpose. They stay in your lap, unmoving, except for the tremble that only you know.

When you lost her, you lost her in water. When you woke, you woke up dry.

\---

You go back to work for Carolyn. You don’t know why. There is a new team. A new case. Something to do with Cuba and weapons, a virus perhaps. Maybe there’s a new female assassin. Maybe there’s a new trail of blood. Neither are yours, so you space out the details. You’re shit at your job. Nobody cares.

These are the ruins of your own making. You settle into a new routine. You work (kind of). Sleep (barely). Dissociate (always). Drink (for sure). She is dead. You are not. You lose yourself in a well of memories. You will yourself to drown.

\---

The first time you saw her, you saw her through water.

She had killed before of course, all talent and training and under-the-radar, slipping in and out unnoticed, leaving with life tucked in her pocket, a tidy bulge. She had killed more than once. She had killed more than twenty. But this was the first time that you noticed. The first time that you dipped your toe into her waters and felt the bloated flesh beneath. The flesh belonged to Boris Ivanovich. Found in a hotel bathtub in Budapest. Death by drowning. Nothing unusual. Except for the tiny cuts on his torso, a woman’s disposable razor in hand. The cuts weren’t fatal. Maybe decorative. Somewhere a killer was getting bored. Somewhere someone was showing off.

You felt her reach for you through the water. An outstretched hand. Together you stood on the edge of boredom. 

\---

When loss enters, it enters all wrong. You lost a friend once. You got over it. You lost a husband. You barely blinked. Now you lose the doorkey and scream for hours. Your favorite TV show is canceled and you throw a bottle against the wall. You step barefoot through glass for days and who needs slippers when you can have injuries? (Who needs slippers when you’ll lose them too?) At some point you stop drinking wine. You lose the corkscrew and scream at yourself for losing everything, losing everyone, losing her. You let her go. You let her go! Loss, like riptide, pulls you under. You swallow water. You start on tequila. At least you didn’t lose the pills.

\---

After Ivanovich, you had asked an intern to set up alerts on your computer. It was passive at first until you learned better, until you grew skilled at scouring intelligence briefings, Interpol traffic, crime scene reports. You looked in places that you weren’t supposed to. You stayed at the office late at night. The perks of being spy adjacent. You stuffed copies of killing and chaos into your handbag and carried them home.

At first, you just looked, with eyes on the detail. And then you touched, with fingers on paper. And then you touched, with fingers elsewhere. One night, home by yourself, you ran a bath, undressed, and sunk yourself in and under. Warm water - her water now? - wrapped around you, blurring the lines of inside and outside. The razor lay in its usual place. You shaved as always, cutting a little, just because. Maybe you wanted to contribute. Maybe you wanted to know how it felt. You cut and bled and slipped in deeper, tilting your head back, breathing her in. Inhaling water made you splutter. You sat up abruptly, sinuses burning, everything burning. You didn’t know her. You hadn’t met her. 

Your hobby took on another dimension. You called it expertise.

She drowned, they say. She died, they say. But your knowledge comes from elsewhere. You shave and cut and bleed and swallow. You cough and your lungs are clear.

\---

During a lunch break, Carolyn comes to your desk and gives you a photograph of Kenny. It’s a few years old and nicely framed. She doesn’t offer an explanation.

“What the fuck?” you yell, because you do not trust her and why is she here, by your desk, bringing up memories of things that are over?

“It’s been a year, Eve.”

Time flies and time stumbles.

You do not want Villanelle like this, stuck in a frame on your bedside table, gathering dust until you can’t stand it, shoving her face down into a drawer. And yet you want memories that are not mugshots, photographs not taken by teachers. If she must stay frozen in time, let that time be yours.

You had some times together, didn’t you?

\---

You watched her for months before you first saw her kill a woman: Susa Maron in the ladies toilet of Osaka airport, hanging from her belt in a stall. You daydreamed that this one was special. You daydreamed that she killed her for you, as if she knew that she had an audience, leaving hints for her number one fan. A clue that she moved through space as a woman. You wanted a woman in your space too.

You found yours in a different toilet, picking her up at a club in Brixton. She caught your eye in the mirror and you followed her back to her drink at the bar. She was your age, maybe, and moved through crowds with some kind of confidence, with tattooed forearms and calloused hands. You do not recall her name. She bought you a drink and rolled you a cigarette and when she laughed you noticed the point of her teeth. She took you home and it was okay. She wasn’t as rough as you wanted. It wasn’t as good as you hoped. When you pushed her, she didn’t push back, just said “take it easy, love,” and you should have left then. But you reached into memories of crime scenes, deft hands and bloody fingers, tightened leather around a neck. It helped a little. It got you over. You left while the woman who fucked you slept.

\---

One day, you march into Carolyn’s office. “Where is she buried? I want to go there.” You speak as if you have the right and she looks at you quizzically, maybe in warning. “To spit on her grave, whatever,” you amend.

“There is no grave, Eve. There was no body. You know that. The ocean took her.” She opens her desk. She takes out a sandwich wrapped in clingfilm. It smells of tuna. “Nourishment, Eve. Now hurry along.”

\---

You only looked away once. She had chainsawed a man’s head open, entered above the eyebrows and pulled out his brain. It gave you chills, just for a moment. Unexpected. It gave you ideas. You wanted to get into her head too, probe around with dirty fingers, take her apart and see how she worked. You did it too. Different techniques, but the same kind of violence. She didn’t like it. You didn’t ask. 

\---

There was one more woman before you met her. Hers was found in a bed in Athens, fully clothed, a deep cut through the brachial artery, one hand folded over her heart, the other raised as if waving goodbye. You thought of how she maneuvered that body, sculpting it into the shape that she wanted. You thought of it often. Your woman was in a different bed with far less clothing. Your woman wasn’t allowed to touch. You took control. You sculpted her into shapes that you wanted and fantasized that someone was watching, admiring, directing. Good enough for now.

“I’m thinking,” you had said to Elena weeks later, in a government car on a country lane. Villanelle had walked towards you, gun raised, and you were thinking of how to tell her that you knew her, even before you knew her name. In the end, it was easy. You used your hands. She recognized your recognition. She understood your submission of interest, your interest in a reenactment, your reenactment of her deathbed scene. She stumbled slightly. Who could blame her? She swallowed hard. Wouldn’t you? _You can have me_ , you said in your head, and somehow she heard it and somehow you knew. She mouthed the gun and shot you kisses. _You can have me too._

“Come with me, just you and me.” You were the first to say it out loud.

\---

It’s days later when it hits you. You see an advert on TV for antibacterial bathroom cleanser and you remember the smell of disinfectant and hospital sheets. You remember Jaylene. She talked a lot and you barely listened and maybe that was the drugs or the drowning, or maybe you are just a dickhead. She said they found you in different locations. 

Carolyn said that there wasn’t a body.

\---

After that, you go a bit crazy.

You watch horror shows on Netflix and fantasize that you are girlfriends in the ‘80s, when you were pre-pubescent and she had not been born. You long for impossible pasts and hopeless futures and her body here and now. If she’s dead, why won’t she haunt you? If she’s dead, fucking stay dead! If she’s alive, where the hell is she? She must be alive. Right? Right! She must be alive.

You decide to cook. You’re shit at cooking but you’ll do it for her. You wield a knife and you’re flooded with memories. You’re way too high and swamped with loss. You chop off the tip of your middle finger at the first knuckle. You save it for later, to feed it to her. Wherever she is, you know she is hungry. Wherever you are, you are hungry too. You pass out but it’s not from the blood loss, it’s just from the sadness. When you wake, the details are blurry, the finger still bleeding. You go to the doctor. It’s too late for stitches or reattachment. That’s okay. Attachment clearly isn’t your style. It will still heal, uneven and jagged. That sounds about right.

Some nights, when you get high, you leave your body, leave your room, and rise up through the evening sky. You stare down at the world below you, all of the countries and oceans and people. You look for her. There! You see her. A tiny dot that won’t stay still. You want to hold her but you’re worried. What if you squash her with clumsy fingers? What if you reach her and she’s not real? What if you’re wrong, fucked up, delusional? Terror makes you lose your focus. You lose her once again.

You can call her to you, can’t you? You are soulmates and isn’t this what soulmates do? You need a mark on your body to bind you. Shouldn’t you carry her mark on you? Not your shoulder. Never your shoulder. That scar signals scalpels and stitches, a surgeon’s skill over her shitty aim. You want something to showcase her beauty. You want something to serve as a beacon, a siren to call her onto your rocks. You have your knife, if not your senses. You cut a V and wait.

\---

She doesn’t come. You knew that she wouldn’t. You know that she can’t. You stood on a cliff. A fucking cliff. You led. She followed. You could have killed her. You did. You didn’t. You need to know. You need to take that leap again.

This is what you know for sure.

She is dead, but she is yours. She is dead, but you are stubborn. She is dead, but you have feelings, gnawing, nagging, greedy feelings that crawl beneath your skin like tape worms, telling you that she is alive. It might be the drugs. It might be the drowning. It’s definitely the absence of her. You’ve lost yourself in your isolation. You’ve found yourself in the drought and rot. Now you need to find her.

First you need to find Faith.

Faith is the girlfriend of Jamie’s ex-husband’s daughter. She works in tech and says she will help you. She comes to your house and smokes weed and does things to enhance your computer. You pretend to pay attention. Reports, photos, classified briefings. Europe and Asia and South America. It’s not the world, but it’s a start. When she leaves, you have full access, undetected, unredacted. Your time takes on a different tone.

For days, you see nothing. For weeks, you see nothing. But you will. She is there. In the fine print of the dossier. In the shadows of the code. You just need to look.

You remember the postcard she sent you from Amsterdam – unreceived – and you picture others, stuck in limbo. She is snapping backs in Hamburg you think, and slitting throats in Buenos Aires, and burning down villages in Istanbul, riding a moped through Battambang tracking down the next to poison. She is building a home for you amidst the crime scenes, writing you love notes on parchment in blood. Nobody sees her. Nobody’s watching. Except you. Finally, you. You run your fingers over the monitor.

Soon, Villanelle, soon.

\---

When you find her, you find her in water. A drowning victim. A half-eaten ear. A hand on a heart. Unmistakable. All for you. 

And once you see her, you see her all over. She’s been active for months.

You see her in the pose of a woman on a bed, suffocated by a pillow, shirt ripped open from armpit to neck. An unusual tearing, but one you remember. She had torn your shirt apart like an animal, face in bedding till you couldn’t breathe. You had smelled her on that shirt for days.

You see her in the corpse in a kitchen, a knife still sticking out from a stomach, a funeral veil draped over a face.

You see her in the man in the lipstick, lips cut open, covered in petals

the couple shot on Tower bridge

the birthday cake laced with arsenic and decorated with candied apples

the Oyster card stuffed down the throat of a woman with her guts ripped out.

She is out there. She is killing. Clues that only you could find. This is reason. This is madness. This is her design.

(And if she is killing, then she is living. And if she is living, then she’s not dead. And if she’s not dead, then someone is lying).

You don’t have a plan, exactly. You do have brains and guts and a gun. An address that you committed to memory after a dinner party last Christmas. It’s good enough for now.

\---

You get a taxi to a north London suburb. The gate creaks. You pass beneath trees with thin bare branches. You think of Kenny. You think of autumn and carefree childhoods and dead leaves crunching underfoot.

Carolyn lets you in. As if she expects you. Perhaps she thinks you have come to kill her.

She and Geraldine are eating dinner. You sit at their table. You look at their soup. The mood is awkward. The mood precedes you. It has been awkward here for years.

You tell her what you already know and the words sound weaker when they are spoken. She looks at you with pity, or maybe disdain, as if you are a dog with fleas who scratches the surface and misses the larvae. You pull out the gun. She sighs heavily. She moves to the sofa.

“Get on with it then. Do your save-the-day thing, Eve.”

You threaten to kill her daughter; she shrugs. You threaten to kill her dog; she caves. You shoot regardless, because it is small and called Martin Martens and once you start it’s hard to stop. You miss the dog and tell yourself that’s what you intended. 

Carolyn reaches for pen and paper. She scribbles a number and hands it over.

“Fine, Eve, but she won’t want to see you. She’s moved on.”

“Give me your phone.” She passes it to you. “Password?”

It only takes seconds. Seconds are nothing. Seconds are long. You did a lot of damage in seconds. You jumped off a cliff and fucked it all up.

You lost your bearings. You lost your reason.

You find them now.

When she answers the phone, her voice is thinner and reedier than you remembered. She’s tired, perhaps, but still attitudinal.

“Again? I said I took care of it. You do not trust me, hmm?”

“Hi,” you say, and what else is there? You hear her breathing and nothing else matters. You hear her swallow and you fall apart. There’s a lump in your throat and a chill at your arm and a pain that pulls you to her. You thought she was dead. You thought you were crazy. You thought you would never hear her again. And so what if you can’t find words? You can sit with her in silence forever, with oceans between you, nations apart. You can sit with her in chaos or violence or movement or calm. And if you see her everyday for the rest of your life, you will always –

“Have they hurt you?” She breaks in. “She said they would hurt you. Or send you to prison.”

“No. You?”

“No. Yes.”

You didn’t expect her to be honest. You didn’t expect her to be alive. 

“I’m coming, okay. Tell me where.”

“Have you killed her?”

You look at Carolyn. She looks back with meager interest, mostly boredom. Maybe she’s trying to stifle a yawn.

“No. Should I?”

“It’s up to you. She’s not that important. She’s playing both sides but she’s not the boss.”

 _She’s dead, Eve._ Not that important. _She’s dead, Eve._ It’s up to you. _Dead, Eve._ She fucking destroyed you. _Dead dead_

“Eve?” Villanelle’s voice cuts in. “What are you doing?” Her voice has brightened. Playful. Lethal. You picture her sitting upright, biting her lip, curiosity straightening her spine. She could be asking you what you are wearing, what you are eating. She could be playing with a switchblade. Open. Close.

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Tell me, hmm? I want to hear you.”

It would be easy, with her in your ear. It would be easy, without her too. To crook your finger and pull the trigger. To stare down at the slumping body, the screaming daughter, the barking dog. To feel something or feel nothing.

“Carolyn is on the sofa.”

“Where are you?”

“By the table. I’m moving closer.”

“What else?”

“I’m pointing the gun and – ”

“You have a gun?” She interrupts you. Instincts heightened. Senses sharp. You think of her hunger, appetite whetted. The cut of her teeth. “Okay, Eve. Carry on. Where are you pointing it?”

“At her head.”

“Hmm, gunshots are not very intimate. We know that. Unless – “

“I could make her get on her knees.“

“Unless you push it into her mouth.”

You speak at the same time, words overlapping, Your voices tangle on top of each other, rolling around. Vying for dominance? Forming a team? Coming together?

Villanelle laughs, low and dirty.

“What was that, Eve? Who do you want to get on their knees?”

“What was that, Villanelle? What do you want to push in a mouth?”

This is new. To call up your history and put it in words and sit together in the memory. You notice how it feels to share it, to understand what the other is thinking, to think it too. Silence again, except for the breathing, but now it is thick with substance and meaning, dripping with a meatier charge. You know yourself better when you are with her. She knows herself better when she is with you.

“Do you think about it much?”

“Every time life gets boring, Eve, I think of you. I think of you.” 

“What are you thinking about me now?”

She laughs again. She will see you soon, you imagine, with your hacked off hair and chopped off finger and fucked-up-on-pain-pills strung out ass. She’ll laugh more and it won’t be cruel. She sees you and she doesn’t mind it. She sees your hunger. You see her hope. You see the way that they slot together, missing pieces of a fucked up puzzle.

“I think that you’re ready to let yourself go.”

\---

You almost forgot about Carolyn. You might have released her. But then she coughs to get your attention. She has bait of her own to dangle. A snare to place around her own neck.

“Yes?” you say and, fuck, you hate her. Her indignation. Her manipulation. Even now with a gun at her head, she thinks she’s in charge.

“I know things, Eve. I work for them. The rogue faction that challenged Hélène. You and Villanelle were very helpful. You did exactly as I hoped. Now we’ve moved to the next level. I can explain it. The masterplan behind the chaos. The man – or woman – behind the curtain. You’ll know more than you’ve ever imagined. I can bring you in, Eve.”

_She’s not that important._

“Why did you say that Villanelle was dead?”

Carolyn looks at you like you are stupid.

“You slow her down, Eve. You know that.”

Smug. Haughty. Condescending. People have died for lesser crimes. Fuck knowledge. You want violence. You steady the barrel against her forehead. You steady the phone against your ear.

“Yeah, I’m ready,” you tell Villanelle.

Villanelle hums thoughtfully. “Or you could wait and we do it together?” She could be talking about watching a movie or masturbating or getting lunch.

You could. You can. You don’t.

\---

Villanelle was right of course. Gunshots are anti-climactic. They still feel good.

“Fuck,” she hisses. “I’m missing out. What did you do, Eve? You shot her twice?”

Always impatient. The child who wants ice cream. The beast who wants blood. She doesn’t try to hide her excitement. “Eve! Tell me. Eve!” It’s your turn to play with her neediness. “Beg, baby,” you try to say, but you can’t stop laughing.

You hang up briefly and send her a photo. Mother and daughter. A family portrait of bullets and blood. It makes you pause. What happened to you? What happened to her? Messaging photos, sharing secrets, communicating through inside jokes? And then you remember all of the bodies that brought you together. All of your endings are in those beginnings. You used to think that nothing was fated. And now?

You reconnect to the sound of laughter.

“The shoulder, Eve? You aimed for the shoulder?!”

“I shot her for me. I saved her for us.” You haven’t felt this good in forever. This silly. This light. You delight in your wickedness and call it freedom.

“Just make sure you leave her unconscious.” _Someone to watch you, admire you, direct you. “_ Geraldine too.”

“You know Geraldine?”

“Long story.”

Whatever. You don’t really care. “How long until you get here?” ~~~~

“I’m in Battambang. I fly out tonight.”

“Ha, do you have a motorbike?”

“What? You are so weird, Eve. Get your passport. Meet me where I played with razors. Same room. I know you know it. I want to do the next one together.”

It’s the closest you’ve ever come to a date.

“What about Carolyn?”

“She can wait. Trust me, Eve. She won’t do anything.”

“Hang on a minute.”

You put down the phone. Carolyn clings to the edge of consciousness. Not for long.

“Recovery’s a bitch,” you say, as you slam the gun into her temple. You hear the crack. Her skin splits open. It should sound sickening but it doesn’t. It’s just a sound. She slides to the floor. Her leg twists under the coffee table.

Your phone buzzes in your pocket. You can’t stop smiling. You kick the dog and head to the door.

“Hey.”

Outside, the temperature has dropped. You zip up your jacket and pull on your hood. You close Carolyn’s door behind you. You walk and you don’t look back.

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I love writing this version of Eve and Villanelle so I might add more to the story later. Please let me know your thoughts. Kudos and comments are always welcome!


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